Thursday, July 16, 2015

Pet Peeve



Some eye candy to soften this post...

As you may know I have a pet peeve...or two!

It makes my teeth ache when I see typos in books.  It especially makes my teeth ache when people simply don't know how to spell words.

I know, I know, I shouldn't complain.  Not everyone knows how certain words are spelled, and lord knows I make my share of typos.  Or now, auto-correct makes them for me.  Sometimes you just don't know if the person doesn't know or if they are battling auto-correct.

But in terms of clear communication, spelling words correctly goes a very long way towards effectively getting your message across.

The worst one, to my eye, is dying/dyeing.  It's always a jolt when I read that someone has spent their day dying.  Amusing when you finally figure out that they weren't actually dying, but dyeing.  I even have a very funny story about that, much too long to relate here and now, but ask me sometime in person when I can do the facial expressions and reactions of the people listening to the conversation I had with someone about dyeing when they thought I meant dying...it's really funny in a macabre sort of way.

However, with so many new weavers entering the warped side, I strongly suggest that they get a book and learn the actual weaving terminology in order to aid communication in this text based medium (the internet).

So, it's dyeing, not dying.  Sleying not slaying or sleighing.  Treadles for what you do with your feet and threading for entering the warp ends into the heddles.  Etc.  Just saying...

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks Laura, I agree completely. It doesn't help matters that there are several variants of English with their different spellings - I had put the dyeing/dying down to one of these, like cheque/check etc but now I know better so thank you.

Many fields have specific terms and language which is important to get correct if you want to communicate in that sector and it infuriates me when this gets referred to as "jargon" like its a bad thing. Now I have to use the talky thing to ask my mechanic about getting the roundy things on my transport thing changed :-)

Sandra Rude said...

Another complete agreement here! As a (former) technical writer, I know that precise and correctly spelled and punctuated prose is A Good Thing for clear communication.

Carol and Paul said...

The edge of your weaving is the selvage (American) or selvedge (British) not the salvage. And the sticks that help organize the warp are lease sticks, not leash sticks. And, yes, I am a proud a Grammar Queen.

Cindy said...

LOL, you know my favorite is fibre/fiber. But my biggest pet peeve in grammar is sale and sell. Instead of "I want to sell it and it's on sale", I have to grit my teeth at..."I want to 'sale' it....."

Debi said...
This comment has been removed by the author.